


High School Reunion

by hma1313



Category: High School Musical (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, M/M, School Reunion, in which they both realise some things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-28
Updated: 2015-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-23 11:43:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4875577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hma1313/pseuds/hma1313
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>East High's reunion for the class of 2008 was never going to be a good thing. After ten years of hardly talking to his former classmates, Chad Danforth has no intention of seeing them all again to make awkward small talk for an evening. In particular, he doesn't want to see Ryan, because that will only bring back a summer of memories he'd rather forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	High School Reunion

**June 2018**

Chad’s email inbox was surprising empty for a Monday morning. There was the usual spam, the electricity bill, something from one of his colleagues that should have been sent to his work email and, finally, an email from someone whose address wasn’t in his contacts with the subject line ‘IT’S TIME’. Chad opened the email and was greeted with the Wildcats logo and everything in the traditional East High red, white and gold. With a feeling of dread in his stomach, he began to read, even though he already knew what it was.

> _Hi all!_
> 
> _It's been 10 years since we graduated East High. Hasn't time flown? The reason I'm writing is to invite you to the reunion of the class of 2008. It's been too long since we've all seen each other, don't you think?_
> 
> _Venue information, along with more details on the event, are attached. The reunion is on 14th July - RSVP by 10th July._
> 
> _See you then!_
> 
> _Martha x_

Chad picked up his phone from the breakfast bar and dialled Troy, who was practically the only person he'd kept in touch with after graduating high school.

"Dude, have you checked your email mail recently?"

"Not since last night, why? What's up?"

"Martha is trying to put together a fucking reunion, that's what." Chad looked back at the email on his laptop screen again, as though by simply willing he could make it all disappear.

"A reunion as in a high school reunion? Great! I've always wanted to see what everyone's got up to, haven't you?"

"No," Chad said, hardly believing his ears. "No, I haven't. This is a terrible idea, why can't you see that?"

"Not it's not! It'll be fun! Hey, Chad?"

"Yeah?"

"What team?"

Chad hung up the phone.

* * *

 

July 14th came far too soon for Chad’s liking. As he drove to the location of the reunion, he wondered why he’d agreed to come. It was going to be shit, he knew it was, high school reunions just had that reputation – no one really wanted to make small talk with the people they’d left their hometowns to avoid for four hours. And if Ryan showed up, he was _fucked_.

He pulled into the parking lot of the venue, parking between a beat up old pickup and a BMW, the latest model, feeling as though his average, mid-range car fitted well in between the two. Inside, he could see several people there already, most of them hanging around the bar and looking like they were ruing their decision to come here.

He walked inside the building, where Martha was sat at a table, with labels with everyone’s names on and a checklist. She looked good, she’d lost some weight since leaving high school and was wearing a purple dress with an empire line that suited her figure better than anything he’d ever see her wear before.

“Hey, Chad,” Martha beamed as he walked over. “So glad you came. If you’d just like to sign next to your name and take this label…”

Chad took the sheet and signed next to his name, looking down the list to see who else was supposed to be coming. A feeling of dread settled in his stomach when he saw the name underneath his own. It was the one he hadn’t wanted to see on the guest list: Ryan Evans.

He gave Martha a tight smile as he took his label and pinned it onto the pocket of his jacket. Martha directed him in the direction of the bar, told him that Zeke and Jason were already here with their respective wives, and that Troy and Gabriella were due to arrive soon.

Chad chatted to Zeke and his wife Kellie for a while, learning how they’d met at culinary school and had set up their own wedding and birthday cake business up in Florida, which was where they now lived. They also had a son, Jack, who at the age of six, specialised in making double chocolate chip cookies, although Zeke hoped to introduce his son to the more advanced baking sooner rather than later.

“What about you, Chad?” Kellie asked. “Anyone special in your life?”

“No, not at the moment,” he replied. Out of the corner of his eye, he could have sworn someone with blond hair had just come through the door. Trying not to make too much of a big deal out of it, he shifted around slightly, so that he could see who had just arrived. “Had a few boyfriends here and there, but none of them really stuck around for long.”

Chad didn’t have time to compute the look of shock on Zeke’s face as Ryan Evans had just arrived, and Ryan was making a beeline straight for him.

“You know,” Ryan said loudly, making several people turn round from their conversations, “You’ve got some nerve showing up here.”

“I have?” Chad asked, ignoring the look of _seriously dude, what the fuck_ on Zeke’s face.

“Yes, you have. I’m surprised you turned up at all. Makes a change, though, right? Unlike all those times at the end of summer break.”

“I’m not doing this here, Ryan!”

“What, so now you’re not even facing up to what you did to me? Jesus Christ, Danforth, what the hell did I get involved with you for?”

More people were now starting to stare. Troy and Gabriella had just arrived, but had stopped somewhere before Martha’s table, watching the scene with wide eyes. It then occurred to Chad that no one knew about what had happened between him and Ryan. It had happened when everyone was rushing round getting ready for college, worrying about sharing a dorm with someone they didn’t know and living in a different city. No one had been paying attention to what was going on between the king of drama club and the irrefutably straight basketball player.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Chad said slowly, because now this conversation had started and people had started assuming things, he might as well confirm the questions swirling in their brains, “the great sex?”

Ryan opened and closed his mouth a few times, arms folded tightly across his chest. He was still hot, something somewhere in Chad’s brain unhelpfully supplied. 10/10 definitely still would.

“You’re fucking unbelievable,” Ryan eventually said after he’d finished his goldfish impersonating act. “And I fucking hate you.” With that, he turned round and stormed out of the venue, head held high as everyone stared at his retreating back. Yeah, Chad thought, he was still every bit the drama queen he’d ever been. Perhaps even more so.

After Ryan left, the whispers started, going along nicely with the pointed looks in Chad’s direction. He tried to ignore it and went and sat at the bar, ordering a beer and spending the next few agonising minutes staring into space and picking at the label on the bottle whilst everyone got over the fact that yes, Chad Danforth and Ryan Evans had fucked.

Troy slid onto the bar stool next to his best friend. “So,” he said, signalling over the bartender so he could order a drink, “care to explain the whole thing that happened just now?”

“Not particularly.” Chad took a long swig of his beer, tipping well over a third of the bottle down his neck in one go.

Troy gave his friend a long suffering look as his Jack Daniels on the rocks arrived. “Chad.”

“What? I don’t want to talk about, it, okay? It’s in the past. Whatever me and him had was ten years ago and it’s well over now and I don’t want to talk about it. I almost didn’t come to this stupid fucking reunion because of him. In fact, I was half certain that he wouldn’t even show up.”

“But he did. And you’ve got to deal with the repercussions that come with that. Now, would you like to rethink your earlier response of not telling what happened between you and him?”

“I - uh, fine. Not here, though.”

* * *

The treehouse in Troy’s parents’ yard was still in one piece and structurally sound even after ten years of no one really using it. Chad and Troy sat inside it, leaning against the walls and sharing a six pack of beer between them.

“It started when I agreed to teach him basketball.”

Troy looked up, a frown etched into his brow. “What?”

“You heard. We bumped into each other in the mall, quite literally, on the same day that I broke up with Taylor. I said we could make a basketball player out of him and he took me up on that. Two days later I’m at Lava Springs on the court with a shirtless Ryan Evans and everything started slipping out of my control.”

“Did you even know you were gay then?”

“Yeah, kinda. No, I did, I was just in that fucking awful stage called denial and there was no way I would’ve come out in high school anyway, even if I had accepted it. I mean, Ryan could get away with it, being co-president of the drama club and being, well, Ryan, but could you imagined what a fuss would have happened if I’d come out?”

Troy imagined. He imagined the other guys on the team refusing to get changed when he was in the same room as him. He imagined the look on his father’s face. He imagined a heart broken Taylor.

“What about Taylor?”

“Oh, God, that’s a whole other story. I just dated her and took her to prom because I felt like I had to, you know? I remember we went back to hers after prom and she thought – well, you can imagine what she thought – and it was so fucking embarrassing, man. I couldn’t even get it up. I left, snuck into a club and got fucked in the alleyway behind it by some random guy and tried to forget the pained looked on her face when I’d left.”

Troy sat there, trying to let the information sink in. It hurt, it really did, to know that Chad had gone through all this and not even told him – he hadn’t even known until tonight that his best friend was gay. “So you broke up with her.”

“I had to. It was more of a mutual agreement, really. With college she would have been over two thousand miles anyway so it wouldn’t have worked. Our relationship wasn’t exactly like yours and Gabriella’s.”

Troy laughed. “No, I guess not. So, Ryan.”

“Yeah. I carried on teaching him basketball, and about two weeks into the whole thing we’re kissing in the locker rooms and it all went downhill from there.” Chad took a sip of his beer. “Well, not downhill, exactly, because I mean, the sex was great and it was pretty much everything you wanted from a summer fling, but then the summer started coming to a close and things really got bad.”

“Bad how?”

“He started getting attached. Like, ‘Chad, will you be my boyfriend’ sort of attached. It was stupid, because he was trying to make it official for the exact same reasons I broke up with Taylor. I told him no, but he just wouldn’t take no for an answer so I stopped turning up and he decided he hated me. Had every reason to, really.”

Chad reached for the next bottle, throwing the cap of it across the treehouse, it bouncing against the wall and back across the floor. “I was stupid, really,” he conceded as he turned the cap through his fingers. “I was scared of it becoming serious. I wasn’t even out to my parents then, and I wasn’t ready to be. Ryan didn’t understand that part of it and I thought he never would.”

“But you loved him.”

“Yeah,” Chad said; a smiling stretching across his face for what seemed like the first time all evening. “I did. And I think a part of me still does.”

Troy smiled at his friend’s confession. In all honesty, he wasn’t one hundred surprised that Chad and Ryan had had something going on at some point. They may have seemed like polar opposites on paper, but in reality, Troy had felt like on the rare occasions that he’d been home that summer and seen them together, there’d been something he was missing, like an inside joke he wasn’t in on.They'd share those looks only couples understood and always seemed to be around each other.

“Well, maybe he still does too.”

Chad snorted. “I doubt it. He went to _Julliard_ , for God’s sake. He’s on _Broadway_. He’ll be surrounded by other guys much better suited to him than I ever was.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Troy said. “Maybe Ryan doesn’t want to date someone exactly like himself. Maybe he wants someone exactly like you.”

Chad turned to look at his friend. “You really think so?”

“Yeah, I do. Look at me and Gabi, for example –”

“Oh yes, let me look at the perfect storybook couple for an insight into my gay love life, how helpful –”

“Let me finish! No one wanted me and Gabi to be together at first, remember? You were worried I wasn’t concentrating enough on basketball and Taylor was worried that I was distracting Gabi from her studies. No relationship is perfect, Chad. Lord knows Gabi and I have had our ups and downs over the years. But we’re happy together and that’s what matters, right? Now, tell me, have you had other boyfriends since Ryan? When you were at college or whatever?”

“Yeah, but they didn’t last long, a month at most.”

“And why was that?”

“Because they… they weren’t Ryan,” Chad said with slow realisation. “Because they weren’t Ryan…”

Chad was on his feet, his beer bottle abandoned next to Troy. He was at the treehouse ladder when decided to call after him.

“Going somewhere?”

“Yeah,” Chad grinned. “I’m going to get my man.”

* * *

The Evans’ house was every bit as big and intimidating as Chad remembered it was, if not even more so. He stood on the front porch for a good five minutes, wringing his hands, his index finger occasionally coming up to hover in front of the doorbell, only to resume its original position tangled in Chad’s other fingers ten seconds later.

He eventually rang the doorbell, the sound of the chime ringing shrilly on the other side of the door. Chad didn’t even know for certain if Ryan would be here – he’d just taken a guess that if Ryan was staying in town, he’d probably be staying with his parents.

“Yes? How can I help?”

It was Mrs Evans that answered the door, dressed in a bath robe and fluffy slippers, a tube of face mask in one hand and her cell phone in the other. “Oh my God," she said, a shocked expression on her face as she realized who was standing at the door. 

“Who is it, mom?” Ryan’s unmistakable voice called from upstairs. He was probably leaning over the bannisters, Chad thought, but he couldn’t see him.

“No one, honey, nothing to worry about,” Mrs Evans called back to her son. There was the sound of footsteps and Ryan’s door closing before Mrs Evans turned back to Chad, placing her face mask and cell phone on the hall table. “What are you doing here?” she asked in a low voice. “After everything you did to him?”

“Fixing things,” Chad said simply, digging his hands into his pockets.

“Fixing – _fixing things_?” Ryan’s mother repeated incredulously. “You think just turning up out of the blue is going to _fix things_? Well, I hate to disappoint, but that simply won’t work.”

“Well, I’m willing to try,” Chad shrugged. “So, if you’ll excuse me…”

Chad didn’t wait for an invitation; he just slipped past Mrs Evans and made his way towards the stairs. He walked up them slowly, trying to remember the speech he’d prepared on the way over from Troy’s. He couldn’t remember a single word of it by the time he reached Ryan’s door.

He knocked and far too soon for his liking, the door opened, revealing Ryan. A very shirtless Ryan that had definitely been working out since Chad had last seen him with his shirt off.

This time, Ryan didn’t have anything to say. It would appear that they’d got all the arguing out of their system when they’d been surrounded by their old classmates, none of whom had had any idea that they’d even been together. He simply stood there, holding a grey vest top he'd evidently just taken off, staring at Chad.

In one swift motion, Ryan dropped the top, pulled Chad into the room, and shut the door. "What are you doing here?" he asked, folding his arms across his chest, looking up at Chad with slightly narrowed eyes. "Why are you here?"

"I did have something planned," Chad muttered. "But now I don't really know."

Ryan ran a hand through his hair, letting out a sigh. "I'm sorry about making a scene back there."

"You're sorry for making a scene?" Chad repeated. "Who are you and what have you done with Ryan Evans?"

A small chuckle left Ryan's lips.  "I don't know."

A silence fell between them, not quite uncomfortable but at the same time not particularly enjoyable either. Chad wondered what the hell he'd been thinking when he came here, and if there was still a chance for him to leave. 

The only thing that made him stay was when Ryan stepped closer and closed the gap between them, touching Chad's lips with his own in a quick, almost chaste, kiss. "I'm so sorry," he whispered, a single tear running down his cheek.

"It's okay," Chad murmured in reply, kissing Ryan again. This wasn't the particularly adult thing to do in this situation, he knew that: they should be talking things through and getting closure if anything at all, not making out like teenagers and pretending an apology can fix everything. But it was also what they needed, even if they would regret it in the morning. 

"I love you," Ryan whispered as he started to undo Chad's shirt buttons.

"I know," Chad replied, planting kisses down Ryan's neck as he manoeuvred them in the general direction of Ryan's bed. "I know."

Maybe high school reunions weren't so bad after all.  

**Author's Note:**

> hang out with me on [tumblr](http://pllsetskyonice.tumblr.com//) for a questionable mix of fandoms and ships


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